Fall SketchUp Challenge - Empire State Dining Table

I have always been a big fan of the art deco style and early 20th century skyscrapers so I decided to combine both for inspiration for my virtual table design. After plowing through tons of images I found a really great art deco mirror from the 1930’s that really inspired me for the tabletop..For the leg inspiration I used my favorite skyscraper ever designed The Empire State Building!...So this is it..my Art Deco Empire State Dining Table! The material is tiger maple and wenge. The top is solid material glued up and sanded to thickness, then the design is cut out on a CNC. The legs are also all solid, the beefier sections glued screwed and plugged, the more decorative parts just glued on. No stain.. just many coats of a high quality pre catalyzed lacquer. These first images are exported right out of Sketchup..The table is 42” x 110” x 30” and the tabletop is 1 3/4” thick…The original design had the spires protruding through the tabletop, but I didn’t like how it looked…dangerous!This one I did x-ray so you can see the extended tops of the legs that are set in pockets milled in the underside of the top

These next images are the exact same model as the previous images only I rendered them using a photo realistic render plug in called Podium. Once downloaded and installed it lives inside Sketchup allowing you to render your model for a more realistic output. Unlike allot of other render add ons Podium is easy to use..it’s not a complicated sea of checkboxes and settings. It can be learned fairly easily through the website tutorials, a great user forum, and a little trial and error!You can use the sun and shadows in Sketchup when rendering, or not…that’s why some images have shadows and some don’t..Here I did some exploded views to illustrate the construction..I used the free version of Google Sketchup for the model and the Podium plug in is also free to download and install. The only restriction to the free version is that it limits you to 640×480 output size. I would love to build this table…but I think with the materials I chose it might be a tad expensive! Maybe I will do a half scale model…

Brad,You’ve really shown us what can be done with SketchUp. I am impressed with the Art Deco look. I’ve always liked the art style and have in the past incorporated some of the designs in my leather work. I have to say you’ve done a great job all around.Tom

Great stuff Brad. I’ve been looking forward to this. I didn’t realize podium had a free download. i’ll have to try it. Turbosketch is somewhat painful to use. Great looking table and the Empire State is one of my favorite buildings as well.

Thanks again for the nice comments everyone! Steve- as far as the exploded views go, I tried to avoid the temptation to just draw lines on top of other geometry. In other words, I created each piece of the legs individually and made each one a group. Then you’re able to manipulate them as much as you want. I created all my pieces, then assembled the leg, and then just copied it as many times as I needed. Then I just started to pull a few of the legs apart a piece at a time, trying to keep the components an even distance from each other. There is a ruby script that you can buy at http://www.smustard.com that will explode/implode grouped objects for you, and I guess that would be really handy if your model was really complex ..and it would be faster than the way I did it.

wow what a great sketchup job – great table too. really well designed and thought out. I normall don’t dig on art deco – (i guess the colors and shiny metal you normally think of) but this I like – could be the wood, and/or all the detail you put into this.

Fantastic work! An inspired design with a terrific source for that inspiration. I am a born-and-bred-in-the-West kind of guy, but I got a kick out of your theme. Something about that building in the Big Apple that just verifies some sort of instinctive, internal truth. Your presentation of those truths in your design are worthy of high praise indeed. Thanks for taking the time to make this shine!